By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
There are times when an organization is so dysfunctional that it must be eliminated and then restarted. In our 1998 book, Tools for Innovators, Bill Eimicke and I referred to the practice of destroying and then rebuilding an organization as reengineering, and discussed the high-risk strategy of starting over as rare, and often a last-ditch act of desperation. There are many other routes to organizational innovation and improvement, and I am certain that the federal government would benefit from the application of those techniques, just as it did when government operations were “reinvented” under President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. Today, we see the hollowing out of federal agencies under ideological assault by adherents of the right-wing manifesto entitled Project 2025. The effort is not to improve the national government’s efficiency and productivity but, except for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) enforcement, to substantially reduce its presence in American life.
The policy of the Trump administration is organizational destruction rather than improvement. We saw the tragic evidence of that when the Agency for International Development (AID) was dismantled, and medicine and food were denied to impoverished people abroad. And closer to home, we saw that in Texas on July 4th, as floods killed children at a sleepaway camp and destroyed rural communities. These natural disasters are unavoidable, and their increased intensity on our warmer planet does not need to be understood to see the importance of rapid evacuation and competent first response. Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) were asleep at the switch. The lack of local investment in emergency warning systems is another tragic result of the anti-tax and anti-spending ideology of state and local government in Texas, but that is a theme for another day. I suspect the tragic lessons learned at the expense of these precious children and the many other victims will stimulate improvement in emergency warning and response throughout the state. The federal government’s incompetence can be spun, but state and local officials are too close to the tragedy to avoid accountability.
The federal response to the Texas floods was shameful but sadly predictable due to the reduction in organizational capacity in FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. The Secretary of Homeland Security has made it agency policy to approve all expenses in excess of $100,000 and so Call Center contracts expired on July 5 in the midst of the Texas flood emergency. It took several days to finally renew those contracts, and during the pause many calls went unanswered. Contractor approvals at 100K might be appropriate for a mid-size manufacturer, but not for a multi-billion-dollar emergency response agency. Clearly, FEMA is in the process of being dismantled. According to a New York Times piece by Lisa Friedman, Maxine Joselow, Coral Davenport, and Megan Mineiro:
“FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff in the past six months, including 20 percent of the coordinating officers at the agency, who manage responses to major disasters, as well as the head of FEMA’s disaster command center. Also gone: the deputy regional administrator in the agency’s Region 6 office in Texas. David Richardson, FEMA’s acting head, has no emergency management experience.”
The federal role in emergency response is designed to be secondary to state and local efforts, and clearly, all levels of government were overwhelmed by the magnitude of this tragedy. But part of the problem here is a lack of organizational competence at the highest levels of the Trump administration and leadership that is far more interested in image and power than organizational outputs and outcomes. The effective exercise of leadership requires management that nurtures and maintains organizational competence. With indiscriminate performative lay-offs throughout the federal government, anyone with talent and value on the employment market is getting out as quickly as they can. We are seeing this in FEMA, EPA, NOAA, and the State Department, among other targeted agencies. The State Department is about to lay off 1,300 people. It may be that some of these people are not needed, but anyone who studies organizational management understands that it takes time to carefully reshape an organization to minimize disruption and maximize productivity. The Trump and DOGE performative downsizing is designed for political rather than organizational impact. The State Department cuts are a case in point. According to John Hudson and Hannah Natanson of the Washington Post:
“The State Department began firing more than 1,300 employees via email on Friday as a part of the Trump administration’s plans to downsize government and cut back on what it called “bloat” and inefficiencies. The move has come under criticism from current and former diplomats who say the cuts will degrade America’s standing in the world and curb U.S. soft power. The diplomats hit hardest hailed from the offices that Secretary of State Marco Rubio eliminated in his sweeping reorganization of the department, the most far-reaching in decades, including the Office of Global Women’s Issues and the department’s diversity and inclusion programs. But cuts also affected employees working on highly volatile issues, including Syria, a brittle Middle Eastern country emerging from decades of authoritarian rule, and senior officials in charge of chemical weapons issues and multilateral nuclear diplomacy… Rubio informed Congress in May that the department planned to reduce its U.S. workforce by more than 15 percent—almost 2,000 people—as part of a sweeping reorganization intended to streamline what he has called a “bloated bureaucracy that stifles innovation and misallocates scarce resources.” Separately, he has accused certain bureaus within the department of pursuing a “radical political ideology… Longtime observers of the department, however, expressed concern that the loss of institutional knowledge would affect the department’s ability to function.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, once a political opponent of President Trump, is working overtime to demonstrate his adherence to MAGA ideology. The loss of State Department organizational capacity apparently means less to him than the perception that he is a loyal follower of the President and his policies. The State Department, like FEMA, is often called on to run point during emergencies. They sometimes need to evacuate Americans abroad and at other times must provide key information to decision makers about global conditions. These routine functions may well be impaired by these rapid, large-scale staff reductions.
Weather prediction and communication, an absolutely essential function in a world plagued by a growing number of extreme weather events, is also being decimated by the incompetents running the federal government. Reductions in weather prediction capability are both planned and already underway. According to New York Times reporters Lisa Friedman, Maxine Joselow, Coral Davenport and Megan Mineiro:
“Staff reductions, budget cuts and other changes made by the administration since January have already created holes at the National Weather Service, which forecasts and warns of dangerous weather. Mr. Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year would close 10 laboratories run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that research the ways a warming planet is changing weather, among other things. That work is essential to more accurately predicting life-threatening hazards. Among the shuttered labs would be one in Miami that sends teams of “hurricane hunters” to fly into storms to collect critical data. The proposed budget would also make major cuts to a federal program that uses river gauges to predict floods… For months, experts have warned that cuts to the National Weather Service, part of NOAA, could endanger local communities. Those fears have grown since the deadly flash floods in Central Texas earlier this month. By all accounts, the Weather Service issued the appropriate warnings for the region that was inundated by the Guadalupe River on July 4. But the agency had to move employees from other offices to temporarily staff the San Antonio office that handled the flood warnings, and the office lacked a warning coordination meteorologist, whose job it is to communicate with local emergency managers to plan for floods, including when and how to warn residents and help them evacuate. The office’s warning coordination meteorologist had left on April 30, after taking the early retirement package the Trump administration has offered to reduce the number of federal employees.”
This administration demonstrates managerial incompetence in both cutting and adding to government. Even when the federal government acts aggressively and proactively, as they are doing in the terrifying ICE raids throughout the nation, they are more focused on performance and image than results. Our judicial system may be slow and creaky, but masked, unidentified armed enforcement agents removing people from the streets without cause and then without legal representation will not be allowed for long in this country. There is wide support for enforcing immigration laws, but there is equally wide opposition to the techniques being employed by ICE and the military forces deployed in American communities by the Trump Administration. Competent enforcement of the law is careful and designed to conform to the rule of law. Every police officer knows that an illegal arrest will enable criminals to go free and will not result in punishment. The Trump team believes that they can bypass due process rights due to the “wartime emergency” of illegal immigration. Eventually, the Supreme Court will rule on that issue. A subtle and quiet effort to deport people might actually work, but scores of masked agents in military vehicles during the day in a Los Angeles park is far from subtle and a graphic example of both illegal and incompetent law enforcement.
The judicial response to ICE has already begun in California. As reported by the Washington Post’s Kelsey Ables:
“A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from conducting indiscriminate immigration stops in the Los Angeles area and denying detainees access to lawyers, as the White House continues its immigration crackdown in the state that has set immigrant communities on edge and sparked protests. Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ordered agents to cease racial profiling as part of the raids and also instructed the Trump administration to ensure detainees have legal visitation and confidential legal phone calls. Frimpong wrote that “roving patrols without reasonable suspicion” violate the Fourth Amendment and denying access to lawyers violates the Fifth Amendment… In granting the plaintiffs’ request, Frimpong wrote that their request that the government stop conducting such patrols is “fairly modest.” The order is a temporary measure while the lawsuit proceeds. She wrote that Trump administration “may not rely solely” on apparent race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence at a particular location, such as a day laborer pickup site; or the type of work a person does “to form reasonable suspicion for a detentive stop.”
Homeland Security is about to receive a massive increase in funding to enhance border security from President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”. If the funding goes to more of the raids we are seeing in California, political support for enforcing immigration law will evaporate. It seems clear that the goal here is not actually enforcing immigration law but spreading fear in immigrant communities. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is the xenophobic force behind these moves, and for the moment he has the President’s ear. But the ICE enforcement performances do more than frighten immigrants; they scare the daylights out of everyone. They look more like scenes from foreign authoritarian regimes than our image of American law enforcement. It is out of synch with America’s culture and behavioral norms. Just as in many of the other made-for-social-media acts we are seeing out of Washington, it is not designed for effectiveness. If the new Homeland Security resources are used to target enforcement on border security, deporting actual felons and rapidly processing asylum claims, that type of organizational capacity would build political support for federal immigration policy. Mass deportations of the millions of people here illegally are practically and politically infeasible. Many of these folks are our neighbors and friends, and there is very little support for deporting them. Ironically, Trump’s success in reducing illegal border crossings and the fright tactics of ICE have rebuilt support and sympathy for immigrants (79% in a recent Gallup poll) and for providing a pathway to permanent residency (78%) for productive immigrants. Eventually, that will become obvious to President Trump. Miller has the bureaucratic savvy to pivot when needed, but Trump also has a history of getting rid of key staff so he can blame them for an unpopular policy.
The overall story here is widespread destruction of organizational capacity throughout the U.S. federal government. It is easier to destroy an organization than to build it. A reinvention of government similar to the one we saw in the 1990s is probably long overdue. There is bloat and redundancy due to the lack of visibility and accountability throughout these bureaucracies. It is not a deep state conspiracy, but simply an iron law of government bureaucracy because it is unconstrained by either the discipline of the market or visibility to the public. Whatever your political views might be, there are certain irreducible fundamental functions that the government must perform. At the local level, this includes water supply, sewage treatment, garbage pick-up, education, and public safety. At the federal level, it is largely international security, public safety, and economic well-being. These functions require organizational capacity to be performed. The destruction of that capacity at the federal level is dangerous, and its impact will be seen in operational failure and in public opinion as well as in the midterm elections.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
